15,000 people are dead. Forget being fine for a moment. This is a substantial loss of life compared to recent wars. That number is guaranteed to, at the absolute minimum, double, but has a more probable lower bound at 100,000.
This will be a death toll that hasn’t been seen in a lifetime. Yeah, maybe the economy won’t collapse. Maybe it will. Regardless, it’s unkind to downplay the severity of the situation.
H1N1 in 2009-10 is best estimated to have killed somewhere from 200k to over half a million people - without the widespread global mitigation measures we are witnessing today. So, hard to say now if it will be a death toll that hasn't been seen in a lifetime.
At a macro level, we need perspective. This year around 3 million people will die for various reasons in the US. 15K deaths would be a rounding error, and even 100K wouldn't move the needle much.
COVID19 is scary and we should respond, but we are panicking well out of proportion to the threat. We should continue to make our best effort to prevent it from spreading while getting society back to some kind of normal footing, and then use the lesson as an opportunity to improve our preparations and planning for the next time.
I think a good lower bound for the number of COVID19-related deaths in the USA without proper measures is somewhere in the millions, not hundreds of thousands. And that includes a very large blow to our medical system.
This is one of those cases where the disease is far worse than the cure.
What you are reporting is disingenuous and uninformed. CDC estimations of flu deaths in 2019 suggest that the number you provide match a regular flu season. Note that this source provides US only stats: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
Do CDC do the same as UK, who apparently report all additional Winter deaths as "flu" (which rather helpfully for the government shifts focus away from poor elderly care during "austerity", still being cut further AFAICT). Only the ONS (Office for National Statistics) also report the actual verified data on flu and instead of numbers O(10k) it's O(100).
For 2017, the most recent year, it's ~450 deaths total for the UK [1], vs an anticipated infection rate of 20% of the adult population and 50% of the rest. That's 450/15M, 0.003%.
Reported death rates are O(1%) for Covid19.
Could you explain that discrepancy?
The BMJ (British Medical Journal) has some discussion of the controversy of over-reporting of flu deaths here [2].
Re those CDC figures, do you really have ~200,000 people hospitalised with flu each month in USA?
But how many "Covid" deaths would have been attributed to something else if we hypothetically had never become aware of it? Hopefully we are able to answer this someday, with more reliable data, and a thorough analysis of the events that are occurring at the moment. I could see the answer ranging from "all of them" to "much less than the majority currently think". I just hope we can answer it with confidence, so we are better prepared in the future.
This shouldn't be compared to a war, in terms of death count. We never want to take death lightly, but a large percentage of the deaths happening now are in people that are already very sick or old and likely to be severely affected by a number of health ailments and infections.
This will be a death toll that hasn’t been seen in a lifetime. Yeah, maybe the economy won’t collapse. Maybe it will. Regardless, it’s unkind to downplay the severity of the situation.